Vintage Computing

My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 2 – Franklin PC-8000

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Welcome to part 2 of my history with computers.

Let’s start getting to a much more robust part of my computer using history. The Commodore 64 certainly was the seed, but this machine was what really catapulted my interest. It’s the first “Real PC” I used growing up. Technically, like the Commodore and the next chapter, this computer belonged to my parents, but my friends and I used it a lot for quite a few things, beyond just gaming.

Though we did use it for gaming.

Gaming

Visually, it was actually kind of a downgrade from the Commodore. The C64 connected to a small color TV (which would eventually be my bedroom TV, with a big chunky couple of knobs on the front.) The Franklin has a monitor, with two colors, black and green. It had two whole 5.25″ drives in it, no 3.5″ disk drives and certainly not a hard drive. It did have a cool dot matrix printer though, which I’ll touch on a bit more in a bit.

It’s worth sidetracking a bit during this time period, and worth mentioning my out of state but fairly frequently visited grandpa had a Tandy 1000 machine, with a color monitor, and that was totally amazing. It pretty much overlaps with this same era of my home PC use and my grandpa was the source of essentially all programs and games I had at home. I have no idea where he got them, but I made copies of most everything he had and his disks were all copied from somewhere. Mostly I remember playing two titles on my grandpa’s PC, along with my brother and cousins. King’s Quest 1, which we never could figure out, but it was fun. And Leisure Suit Larry 1.

Now, Leisure Suit Larry, for the uninformed, is an old, “adult” game series. We did not know this, and we never did reach any of the old content, because like King’s Quest, we make some progress, and the game was funny, but we never did get past a certain point. Specifically, we never did figure out the door password (it’s Ken Sent Me), so we never could progress the plot beyond drinking at the bar, gambling at the casino and buying booze and “lubbers” at the convenience store. The age gate on this game was that it would ask a series of questions that “only adults would know”. So my cousin and I would load the game, then go to the kitchen where out parents were hanging out, and ask them the questions, to get the answers.

Anyway, I don’t believe either of these games worked on the Franklin PC we had at home, because it wasn’t EVGA.

There were others, but the two most notable games we played at home were The Ancient Art of War and Simcity. One was an early sort of RTS game, the other was well, Simcity. Both are notable here because they had user created content. Simcity is all about user created cities. Even with the limits of the game, I remember building out mirrored cities sometimes, then using the disasters to pretend they were at war. Simcity also had some DRM, because you had to enter the population of a city from a sheet of paper based on some hieroglyphs. My friend actually owned the game, so I would just, call him up and get the numbers, I also had a selection of them written down in a notebook, and would just close and reload the game until the random city was one I had marked down.

I also would use that sweet printer to print maps, because it was a feature of the first Simcity. You could print out your city, and it would spit out I think 16 sheets of paper that you could tape together in a 4×4 block of paper sheets and have a huge cool map poster. I may have one buried somewhere too. I would then color in all the zones with the correct colors with marker to make it look cool. You might wonder how I knew what the colors were, well, my grandpa had that TANDY 1000 and my friend had a color PC, so I was aware the game had colors, I just, didn’t get them.

Ancient Art of War let you make custom maps and missions. Which was so awesome and I spent a lot of time making maps. Assuming the data hasn’t been corrupter, I have copies of those maps somewhere, maybe I’ll post them. There were several other games I played a lot that also had user generated content. There was a golf game where you could make courses with dinosaurs and play as Jack Nicklaus. And me back then, had no idea what the Joker Guy (Jack Nicholson) had to do with golf but ok whatever. There was a baseball game called Earl Weaver Baseball where you could do custom teams, and I would make teams themed around video games, like a River City Ransom team, and a Mega Man team where every player had maxed out stats (because robots are perfect).

I think my point is, that this was part of the birth of my interest in digital creation. But not just for games.

Programming

During this time period, my dad was going to college through his job, and getting a degree in Computer Science. I have no idea what a Computer Science degree in the 80s involved, but I remember going to the graduation (vaguely). Or at least him graduating. At some point though, presumably because he was learning it as part of the curriculum, he taught me a bit of BASIC computer programming.

I would have been like, 8 or 9 at this point. I showed my friends how to do it as well, and we would make silly little useless programs that would print out funny patterns scrolling on the screen. Or “super secure password” systems, along the lines of:

10 IF password="SECRETPASSWORD" THEN
30   PRINT "SECRET DATA"
50 ELSE
70   PRINT "NO WAY LOSER"
90 END IF

I have no idea if that’s actually valid BASIC code, I pulled up a guide to IF/Else in BASIC and cobbled it together.

The point is, it was fun. And it was my first experience with actual programming.

Newsletters

Then there are the newsletters my friends and I would produce using a program called Newsmaster. I have this vague idea that this was the “start” of my writing desire and the newsletters we made, were the precursor to The Chaos Xone, my first website which evolved into Lameazoid.com. These were simple 1 page video game themed “newsletters”. You can actually read these here (Issue 2, Issue 3, Issue 4, if you want, translated into HTML. They are, as basic as you would expect for something produced by 10-12 year old kids.

But that was yet another growing seed of interest. So much started with this machine, a real actual PC with actual useful programs. This doesn’t even touch on the part where it was an 80s IBM PC, which meant booting to DOS, on a floppy, because there isn’t any hard drive in it at all. There was no Windows, it was all a CLI interface. Yet another skill and seed learned from this machine.

My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 1 – Commodore 64

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I often offhand mention the idea of “I’ve used computers my whole life” but I am not sure I’ve ever really gone into a lot of detail on what exactly that means. (I probably have but my memory is pretty shit these days). I’ve decided it might be fun to do a sort of, reminiscing series on the various “key computer points” in my life. Maybe that’s not quite the right way to put it, but basically, the eras’ surrounding specific computers in my life and what I remember about my time using them.

I’m considering doing something similar for consoles and gaming, but if I do, it’ll be over on Lameazoid,.com.

The start of this series though would have to be the Commodore 64. I actually am not real sure if the Commodore classifies as a computer or a console, I certainly used it more for games, but it has a keyboard so I’m going with Computer. My memory on exact time frames is a little shady, but I remember using the Commodore both at the 3rd house I lived in and at my aunt and uncles, so I would have been somewhere around the age of 4-5 at the start of using it. There was some overlap as well with the second computer I’ll cover next week, the Franklin PC-8000. At some point my parents got rid of the Commodore after it was stored away in an attic for a while, and I kind of wish I had kept it.

Like I mentioned, I used this computer for playing games more than anything. I don’t really remember playing a lot of Atari, a friend had one and my out of state grandparents had one, but our first console was the NES, so my first gaming exposure was one of the #PCMasterRace -ish.

Looking for some images to go along with this post, it seems like several of these games were on cassette tapes. I actually have no memory of using Cassette games at all, though it’s possible I did. I believe most of what I had played was on 5.25″ diskettes, or in a few cases, cartridges. Loading the system would bring up this blue screen. I remember you had to do this set of commands to run games, something like “Load *.* ,8,1” then I think it was just “run” or maybe “run *”. I imagine there was more that could be done at that blue and light blue colored command prompt screen but I never really ventured much beyond that.

A few games I remember from the Commodore, though a couple I am not sure I actually enjoyed, and I am sure there are others I DON’T remember.

Park Patrol

I remember this game, most of all, and I would consider it to be my favorite game on the Commodore. I can still hum the music today, 40 some years later. You play as a park ranger, rescuing people who are drowning in the river. The top half of the screen is the shore, the bottom half of the screen is the river.

The map loops, maybe it’s actually a lake.

Whatever the case, you had to avoid snakes and turtles and you had a little raft you had to use to rescue people in the water. This was also my first experience stomping turtles, not Mario, at least I think you would defeat the turtles by jumping on them. I do remember when you died, you would shrivel up into your hat, which kind of resembled the turtles, so we’d joke that you got turned into a turtle.

Ghostbusters

I have a love hate for this game. Ghostbusters at the time was super cool. So hey, cool, a Ghostbusters game! But my friends and I could never figure out what to do in this game. You would select a car, and some supplies and drive around collecting ghosts and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man would crush buildings and then you’d lose the game. Later (like, much later), i think I looked into it and you were supposed to collect the key and lock and take them to the center building to defeat Gozer.

It had some fun elements, but it also was frustrating and tedious.

Kids on Keys, Wizard of ID

I think I still have Kids on Keys in a tote somewhere. I don’t actually remember much about that game other than it was typing practice. Which is why I’m looping it in with Wizard of ID, which was also a typing game. I suspect this was the true reason we HAD the Commodore in the first place, because my mom would play these typing games, to get proficient for work.

I was bad at Wizard of ID, though I didn’t have a need to type a lot back then, and I didn’t quite get the point I think. I do know the big smoke monster was kind of creepy and it would slowly become more and more enraged unless you fed it letters (by typing), until it flamed you and you died.

BC’s Quest for Tires

One last sort of, honorable mention. This was one my uncle had so I only played it occasionally, but I do remember it. I almost looped it in with the typing games because I could swear it was a typing game and the faster you typed, the faster the little dude would go. It seems that was not the case, or maybe it had a typing mode that wasn’t the main game.

It’s essentially just an Endless Runner game. You have to jump and duck to avoid obstacles as you speed along the map. I don’t remember if the map was actually “endless”.

The other main thing I remember about this game is that it is based on a newspaper comic strip. Which seemed really weird, even then. I mean, I knew games could be “based on things”, there was a Ghostbusters game. But the newspaper comic strip part seemed odd.